About the Course

Spiritual sequel to Peter Thiel’s CS183 course on startups. Bridges the gap between academic computer science and production software engineering. Fast-paced introduction to key tools and techniques (command line, dotfiles, text editor, distributed version control, debugging, testing, documentation, reading code, deployments), featuring guest appearances by senior engineers from successful startups and large-scale academic projects. Over the course of the class, students will build a command line application, expose it as a web service, and then link other students’ applications and services together to build an HTML5 mobile app. General principles are illustrated through modern Javascript and the latest web technologies, including Node, Backbone, Coffeescript, Bootstrap, Git, and Github.

The notes for this course are also available here:Â http://startup.stanford.edu/

This course is quite interesting, because it really shows how a lot of startups in Silicon Valley are rapidly bootstrapped at a technology level.Â These days a lot of these startups use Linux out of the box, and don’t even bother looking at the alternatives.

Obviously, I like FreeBSD a lot, and think FreeBSD is a great platform for startups.

What are the things that we as a FreeBSD community can do to improve the FreeBSD platform,

and make it a no-brainer decision for startups to use it for their new companies?

The startups of today become the billion dollar companies of tomorrow, so it is important that FreeBSD is a part

of that.

I’d love to hear the ideas of people in the FreeBSD community for how to make FreeBSD better for startups!